Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco

by Peter Shapiro

  This narcissism achieved its peak with the Mods. The Mods wanted to turn their backs on traditional gray old England and its bleak Victorian factories belching out acrid smoke on its cloth-capped workers and their shabby council houses. The Mods did this by wearing made-to-measure suits with continental cuts and bright Fred Perry shirts, riding Italian Vespa scooters and cutting their hair à la Jean-Paul Belmondo. If it meant spending two weeks’ worth of wages to get the right shirt in order to achieve the right look, then so be it. Of course, such extreme aestheticization found its way to music, and the ultimate Mod, antitraditionalist music at the time was black American music like James Brown’s “Night Train” or Martha & the Vandellas’ “Come and Get These Memories.”

  As soul music became a more mainstream proposition thanks to the hit-making prowess of Motown, though, the Mods began to search for more obscure records that would set them apart from the pop flock. The most influential DJ in this regard was Roger Eagle of the Twisted Wheel. As early as 1965, Eagle was searching out soul records that were rare even in America: Chubby Checker’s “(At the) Discotheque,” the Sapphires’ “Gotta Have Your Love,” Darrell Banks’s “Open the Door to Your Heart,” the Flamingos’ “The Boogaloo Party,” Earl Van Dyke’s “Six by Six.” With the exception of “Open the Door to Your Heart,” these records—and most of the records that really moved the dance floor at the Twisted Wheel—all had that monolithic, stomping, four-square Holland-Dozier-Holland Motown backbeat and uplifting tempo and chords (usually masking the pain of the lyrics) in common. They were high-energy rave-ups that fit the amphetamine atmosphere of the Twisted Wheel perfectly. This unique subculture now had its signature sound that would remain unchanged for years, and in 1970 it would finally get a name when in an article for Blues & Soul magazine journalist and leading light of the British soul scene Dave Godin coined the term “Northern Soul” to distinguish it from the funkier, more contemporary soul music that was being played at clubs in London.

  Many of the ultrarare records that would fuel the Northern Soul scene were “discovered” by Ian Levine, the son of two well-off Blackpool club owners. His parents’ comfortable financial position enabled him to travel to the United States at a time when foreign holidays were still a rarity for the vast majority of the British population, and it was on these trips, usually to Miami, that Levine found the records that gave birth to a subculture. “When my parents were sunning themselves on the beach, I was getting on a bus going round these ridiculous areas, going through various warehouses looking for records, going through hundreds of thousands of old forty-fives,” he says. “There was a … Miami Goodwill where the radio stations would donate all their old records. There were a quarter of a million records there with no jackets, all loose, and that’s where I found all the stuff, on Flagler Street in Miami.”97

  Levine was at first supplying his records to DJs at both the Twisted Wheel and then the Blackpool Mecca, watching with delight as the countless hours he spent scouring junk shops uncovering records like J. J. Barnes’s “Our Love Is in the Pocket,” Rose Batiste’s “Hit and Run,” and Pat Lewis’s “No One to Love” resulted in dance floor gold. In 1971, he finally became a DJ in his own right at the Mecca and one of the biggest names on the scene. But Northern Soul was an aesthetic dead end, an ultraconservative, anachronistic sound that was doomed to cause its own demise. Levine was determined to keep the spirit alive, however. “By ’73, ’74, we’d exhausted the supply of these unknown sixties records,” he says. “We’d found most of the good ones at that time, and what we were finding were substandard. We weren’t playing any records that were new; all the records we were playing were from the sixties or three or four years earlier. What changed it all was a record I heard on the radio in Miami by the Carstairs called ‘It Really Hurts Me Girl’ on Gene Redd’s label, Red Coach, which was all set to come out distributed by Chess Records, but Chess folded and went into liquidation. Because they went under, the record never came out. It took me six months to find a copy. It had a very primitive, early disco beat, but it had a very throaty, intense Northern Soul vocal, really seriously powerful vocal. The record became a kind of anthem and it changed the Northern Soul scene around. So suddenly, people were craving these kinds of records.”98

  Levine was satisfying this hunger for newness with records like Patti Jo’s “Make Me Believe in You” and First Choice’s “The House Where Love Died”—records that were equally important in New York—as well as pure Northern obscurities like the Montclairs’ “Hung Up on Your Love,” Marvin Holmes’s “You Better Keep Her,” James Fountain’s “Seven Day Lover,” the Anderson Brothers’ “I Can See Him Loving You,” and Kenny Smith’s “Look What’s Happening to Your People.” “This is all around ’74, and these were all obscure early disco records on little, tiny labels that no one could get hold of,” Levine continues. “Suddenly, the Northern scene split into two factions: the purists who went to a club called the Wigan Casino who wanted to hear the sixties stuff and didn’t want to hear this new disco stuff, and what we were doing at Blackpool Mecca, which was playing these kind of disco records. It was swerving more towards disco but not out-and-out trashy disco like Silver Convention, but proper soul records with a disco flavor. I became fascinated by this, and this is when I went over to America and met Tom Moulton. After 1975, Blackpool Mecca was pretty much all New York disco.”99

  In 1975, Levine started to record his own tracks, first with the veteran New York soul group the Exciters, then with four young singers he discovered in Chicago: L. J. Johnson, James Wells, Evelyn Thomas, and Barbara Pennington. He tailored these records specifically for the Northern Soul scene, but their contemporary sound turned off many dancers. In a weird foreshadowing of the disco sucks “movement,” a faction of clubgoers started the “Levine Must Go” campaign, which culminated in Levine’s car being attacked by a mob that attempted to smash the windows. The ugliness he encountered led him to turn his back on the Northern scene and concentrate on disco, a move that would eventually have a huge impact on the shape of dance music in the aftermath of disco.

  * * *

  While the Northern Soul scene was fetishizing obscure objects of desire, in London a homegrown of sorts soul scene was very slowly starting to emerge. The first black soul artist to perform regularly in the United Kingdom was probably Mel Turner, an American who had sung with one of the various Five Crowns lineups that eventually became the Drifters before he moved to Britain in 1960, where he performed in a style similar to Clyde McPhatter. A few years later, African-American GIs stationed in Britain started to form bands—Geno Washington & the Ram Jam Band, Herbie Goins (and later Ronnie Jones) & the Nightimers—as did Caribbean immigrants (Jimmy James & the Vagabonds, Mac and Katie Kissoon).

  These singers’ deracination collided head-on with musicians who played Motown and Stax like they were reading from a fake book and pop hacks from Denmark Street (London’s Tin Pan Alley) who insisted on putting moon-June-spoon and showbiz glitz into soul’s gospel-derived vernacular. It was a strange, uncomfortable combination, perhaps best exemplified by the Foundations and their transatlantic hits “Baby, Now That I’ve Found You” and “Build Me Up Buttercup.” Even though lead singer Clem Curtis was from Trinidad, he sounded like he was singing phonetic English. The music was similarly awkward, with Allan Warner’s reggae-derived guitar chank sitting uneasily with Tom Jones horn charts and cod-Motown rhythms. Unwittingly, the group had stumbled on the formula that, with minor alterations, would define a peculiar strain of popular music that would become known as Europop.

  With its streamlining of black music’s funkier excesses in order to make it palatable for people raised on schlager and Vera Lynn, Europop’s convergence of African-American rhythms and blue notes with European melodic sensibilities would have enormous implications for disco. The combination of driving rhythm and indulgent artifice was, of course, a perfect expression of the emerging gay aesthetic, but it was also a hallmark of the thermidorean reaction to
the ’60s—the retreat from “consciousness” into the blank innocence that characterized much of the first half of the ’70s. The apotheosis of the early Europop style was Johnny Johnson & the Bandwagon’s “Blame It on the Pony Express”: all tortuous metaphors, singsong strings, and a Motown beat that was more of a dull thud than strutting stomp. The irony was that the group was entirely American and had only just relocated to the United Kingdom after the British success of “Breaking Down the Walls of Heartache” in 1968. “Blame It on the Pony Express” was played at some New York clubs when it was released in 1970 and, aside from bringing Euro to the New World, it introduced what would become another disco convention: the contrast between a husky male baritone and self-consciously pretty music.

  Of all the early British Europop groups, none was more important than the Equals. A multiracial band from Hornsey, north London, the Equals were led by Eddy Grant, who had moved to London from British Guyana at the age of twelve. Their first single, “Hold Me Closer,” was released in 1966, but no one would notice until the following year when the flip side, “Baby, Come Back,” became a number one hit in both the Netherlands and Germany. “Baby, Come Back” was the perfect Europop record: a singer with a seemingly tentative grasp of English, a bubblegum (before the fact) melody, a metronomic beat, a trebly guitar that predates Elvis Costello and the Go-Go’s by more than a decade, and even a bit of ska thrown in at the end. As their 1976 single put it, they were “Funky Like a Train.” In 1970, though, they would achieve disco locomotion with “Black Skin Blue-Eyed Boys.” With its relentless energy (you lose your breath just listening to it, let alone dancing to it), driving, ultrafast bass line, rock-solid drums, woodblock percussion, and punchy, Santana-ish guitar style (creating the early Europop style that would be copied by Titanic and Barrabas), “Black Skin Blue-Eyed Boys” was one of disco’s earliest floor fillers and one of its first anthems.

  The Equals may have been sui generis, but Europop inevitably fell totally into the hands of the hacks. As arranger/producer Gerry Shury told Black Music magazine, “cutting black artists in England was a whole different concept, and you had to make them sound pop to make them acceptable.”100 Shury had arranged and produced British hits in this mock soul style for the Fantastics (formerly an American doo-wop group called the Velours), the Pearls, and Sweet Dreams. Sweet Dreams was a duo of reggae singer Tony Jackson and Polly Brown, a white singer who occasionally performed in blackface. Shury would produce “Up in a Puff of Smoke” for Brown in 1974, and the record got significant play in New York discos thanks to Brown’s Diana Ross impersonation and a crunching kick drum/bass/synth bottom end that would point the way to Amii Stewart’s Eurodisco classic “Knock on Wood.”

  In 1974, Shury hooked up with a producer known as Biddu. Biddu was born in Bangalore, India, in 1944 and moved to England in the late ’60s after a stint with the Indian version of the Rolling Stones. While struggling to make it as a singer-songwriter, Biddu worked as a chef, making doughnuts at the American embassy. In 1971, he started working at Nova Studios in Marble Arch with unknown British-based soul artists like the Lollipops, the Jesters, Tyrone & Carr, and Lon Satton. All of the records he made there imitated the Motown beat and became big on the Northern Soul scene. In 1974, Biddu was working with journeyman Jamaican soul singer Carl Douglas on a song called “I Want to Give You My Everything,” and they needed a flip side for the single. Douglas suggested one of his own self-penned numbers, and in the remaining ten minutes of studio time, the song was arranged by Shury, sung by Douglas, and recorded by Biddu. The song, of course, was “Kung Fu Fighting,” the record that kicked the door in for Eurodisco in the United States.

  In 1975, Biddu would create the protoype for the deluge of Eurodisco epics with his disco version of Michel Legrand’s theme song to the movie Summer of ’42. Complete with wah-wah guitars, hyper skipping hi-hats, and sweeping strings, it was little more than a brazen rip-off of Philadelphia International’s MFSB (see Chapter 4), but the discos ate it up. More ham-fisted quasi-orchestral schlock followed in the form of “Rain Forest,” “Jump for Joy,” and “Blue-Eyed Soul,” but their strange combination of deluded grandeur and wink-wink-nudge-nudge suggestiveness made them the ideal background music for clumsy singles bars pickups. Having soundtracked so much bad sex during his career, it was perhaps inevitable that Biddu was chosen to compose the theme for the Joan Collins flick The Stud. Biddu’s other claim to fame was that he foisted Tina Charles upon the world (Biddu called her a “white ball of fire”).101 Charles had already annoyed hundreds of thousands of Britons with her overenunciated faux blues vocals on the Top of the Pops cover albums and her vocals on 5000 Volts’ “I’m on Fire” (which was somehow reminiscent of Cossacks dancing at a provincial disco in Staffordshire), but when Biddu crafted “I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Loves to Dance)” for her (with a band that included the men who would terrorize the world as the Buggles, Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes), she became inescapable.

  While the British soul scene helped create the blueprint and the foundation for the disco craze of 1977–79 with its lost-in-translation version of African-American music, this was only the beginning of its influence. From the birth of Europop and the culture of the collector through the specter of the cult of Mod hanging over Saturday Night Fever to the birth of Hi-NRG, Northern Soul, with its throbbing beat and stilted take on Motown, would cast a long shadow over disco.

  2

  “I’M JUST AN OUTLAW, MY NAME IS DESIRE”

  Disco and Sexuality

  Do you think homosexuals are revolting? You bet your sweet ass we are.

  —Gay Liberation Front

  If you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.

  —John Wayne

  Music is the connective tissue between protest, rebellion, violence, sexual awareness and community.

  —Lydia Lunch

  It’s 11:30 p.m. on a weekend night in 1970, and in the basement of the old Ansonia Hotel on Seventy-fourth Street and Broadway an unknown singer named Bette Midler takes the makeshift stage by the swimming pool and performs a camped-up version of the scandalous Duke Ellington number “Sweet Marijuana.” Not only is Midler the only woman in the enormous room, but all the men, including her pianist, Barry Manilow, are wearing nothing but towels slung low on their hips. Of course, the men frolicking in the pool aren’t even wearing towels. While most of the crowd is either rapt by Midler’s vampy rendition of Bessie Smith’s “Empty Bed Blues” or hoping to cure their own by cruising the packed dance floor, others are ignoring the show and working out on the exercise equipment in this health-club-cum-nightspot. All of this activity, however, is merely a sideshow to the club’s main purpose—sex. Sex of the most vehement, uninhibited kind. While most of the rampant fornication was hidden from view in the Finnish and Russian saunas, steam rooms, massage parlors, private cubicles, and showers, one visit to the candy machine cured any misapprehension that this was anything but a coitus cloister. Alongside the expected Snickers and Three Musketeers bars, the vending machine dispensed sachets of K-Y jelly. The in-house VD clinic was also a pretty good indicator of where the club’s priorities lay.

  This fleshpot was the legendary Continental Baths, which was opened by former cantor and Fuller Brush salesman turned entrepreneur Steve Ostrow in September 1968. Gay-oriented bathhouses had existed in New York since at least the turn of the twentieth century, when gay men started to frequent the Everard Baths (inevitably nicknamed the “Ever Hard” Baths) on West Twenty-eighth Street, but the Continental Baths marked the beginning of a new era. Instead of the secretiveness and seediness usually associated with the bathhouses, Ostrow was relatively open about his baths and aimed them at an upmarket crowd, advertising them as recapturing “the glory of Ancient Rome.” Ostrow’s all-male health club was festooned with that ultimate symbol of early ’70s luxury—the rattan wing chair—while the glass pillars lent his pleasure palace a classical grace. It was a rather different form of “classicism
,” though, that made the Continental Baths truly important. While the first shots in the battle for gay civil rights were fired in 1966 by the Mattachine Society, a group of gay Communists that split from the main party because of their unwillingness to recognize homosexuality as part of the struggle,1 the Caligula-like scenes at the Continental Baths marked the first defiant steps of an out and proud gay sexuality. This was not a claim on citizenship or belonging, but a confrontational demand by a group of pariahs2 to be accepted on their own terms and a ritualistic celebration of those terms. Disco was born in the rubble of New York, but it was in this pungent hothouse atmosphere that disco really started to take shape.

  The multigenre musical cluster fuck constructed by the wandering ears and fingers of the early DJs mirrored the delicious promiscuity of the bathhouses. Their smooth blends and segues were emblematic not only of a newfound group identity but also of a newly liberated pleasure principle that exploded out of its shackles with such intensity that it wanted to keep going full-bore all night long without stopping. It was a music and a scene of prodigious physicality, an embrace of a previously forbidden body and pushing that body to the absolute limits. Disco was all about breaking the bonds of shame that had imprisoned gay men for centuries. It was a declaration that pleasure didn’t have to be inextricably meshed with guilt and self-loathing. The Kinsey Report and Masters and Johnson may have showed people that there was more to sex than the missionary position, there may have been communes and ashrams promoting “free love,” John Sinclair’s White Panther Party may have advocated “dope, guns and fucking in the streets,” but never before had a popular culture moment so wantonly wallowed in the pit of carnal depravity as disco.